Aims

1. to develop the student's knowledge and understanding of two major traditions within English literary history;

2. to provide students with a knowledge and understanding of the continuing history of debates about the genres of epic and romance.

Brief description

This module offers students a chance to get to know some major works of English literature that there is no time to study in detail in the more crowded core period module, and to locate these works within their wider European literary contexts.

We will begin by an investigation of the late Anglo-Saxon heroic poem Beowulf (which we will study principally in the recent and much acclaimed translation by Seamus Heaney). The module will then turn to a consideration of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, a reworking of the materials of knightly romance through the medium of allegory into a national epic, which engages with important religious and political conflicts of the late sixteenth-century English state. The module will conclude with an extended study of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, which we will consider both as a deliberate and self-conscious reworking of established traditions of heroic poetry, and as a 'working out' in narrative form of the political, social and religious tensions of one of the most exciting and challenging periods of British history, the Civil War and its aftermath.

Since the traditions of epic and romance in our extended period are truly international ones, there will be, in addition, several opportunities to sample (in translation) relevant works from other European literatures: we will, for instance, study Beowulf alongside extracts (provided) from the Old French chanson de geste The Song of Roland; and we will compare Spenser's handling of romance narrative with episodes from the sixteenth-century Italian romantic epics Orlando Furioso (by Ariosto) and Gierusalemme Liberata (by Tasso).

Some of the principal recurrent questions we will address include:

what are the characteristics of the genres of epic and romance, and how distinct from each other are they?

how are the genres of epic and romance transformed in response to changing political and social circumstances?

are these narratives more concerned with the heroic deeds of individuals, or are they fables of wider significance, fictions that offer definitions of national or cultural identity?

is it true that epic is a primarily masculine genre and romance a feminine one?

Content

PROGRAMME

Teaching will be by ten two-hour seminars. Students will regularly be asked to prepare brief presentations, usually in teams of three or four.

Seminars 1 - 3: Anglo-Saxon Heroic Poetry

Main text: Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney

Seminars 4 - 6: Elizabethan Romantic Epic

Main text: Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book II (in Payne and Hunter OR in Roche and O'Donnell: see Bibliography